TRUMBO Read online

  Although Elsie McKeogh tried, as any good agent would, to find an American publisher for Eclipse right up to, and even after, the date of its English publication, she found none for it. In all, the novel was shown to nineteen houses—and nineteen rejected it. But Trumbo left all of that to her and wasted no worries on it. Instead, he concentrated his attention on writing. In February 1935, he sent Mrs. McKeogh a package of five stories, asking her to handle them for him.

  The longest of them (9,400 words) was a story called “Darling Bill,” which Trumbo described as an “anti-New Deal satire.” Was it political? No, he looked at politics then simply as material. Would it make a good story? What sort of background would it provide to the usual boy-meets-girl formula?

  “Darling Bill” is an inconsequential bit of fluff told in letters, clippings, and a press release or two. But the New Deal had made Washington interesting to America, and the Saturday Evening Post, always sensitive to such fluctuations on the national seismograph, bought “Darling Bill” at first look. It appeared in the April 20, 1935, issue. By any standard he was doing well for himself. Another of the four stories he sent off to Elsie McKeogh eventually sold: “Orphan Child,” a comic piece with a Hollywood movie background, appeared in Liberty in the September 7, 1935, issue (reading time thirty-three minutes, thirty-five seconds).

  With the acceptance of a story by the Saturday Evening Post Dalton Trumbo was launched as a successful writer of fiction. Much encouraged, he started a full-length political novel in the same vein—light, satirical, one that traded on the same developing interest in Washington politics and New Deal bureaucracies.

  And in the middle of that, suddenly taken with a new idea for a story, one that seemed a natural for the Post, he took time out to write “Five C’s for Fever the Fiver.” The trick title is the tip-off: it is a horse-racing story, a saga of bettors and bookies, more or less in the style of Damon Runyon. Again, the story is of negligible worth but clever enough in its way and well executed. “Five C’s for Fever the Fiver” is most notable, however, in that it marked the absolute finale to his long romance with Sylvia Longshore. The two had broken up while Trumbo was still at the bakery, but he had never gotten over her, nor over the feeling that he had been cheated by circumstance out of possessing the girl fate meant to be his. Now, suddenly flush with success as a writer, he thought he would make one last effort to reach her and renew their relationship.

  “I worked out a system of names in the story,” he recalled, “that was to be a message to her wherever she was. I remember that the hotel in the story was the Shore Arms—well, that was part of it, and there were other little details that would have been immediately understood by her—a code, so to speak, with the intended result that she get in touch with me. Well, the circumstances were perfect. The story sold to the Post, and it appeared in the November 30, 1935, issue, the week of the Army-Navy game. The Navy goat was on the cover, and my name and the title of the story. Well, I told myself that she had to see that, no matter where she was—and I believe she was on tour. I called her mother, told her what I had done, and jokingly added that if Sylvia had all her teeth and was not pregnant, I’d be delighted to see her. That was when her mother told me that Sylvia had married her dancing partner, a man named Harris, the week before the Post came out.”

  As early as February 1935, Trumbo had written to Elsie McKeogh mentioning Warner Bros.’ interest in “Darling Bill” as a possible motion picture property. Nothing came of that, but he did take the occasion to ask her help in getting a good Hollywood agent. And although she made a specific recommendation, in the end he declined her advice. Trumbo defended his choice of Arthur Landau as his Hollywood agent: “Landau is a robber”—he wrote to Elsie McKeogh—“but he is an efficient and a fearless one, which is exactly what a writer needs in a town filled with robbers.” The dichotomy implied here is interesting. There was then and evidently would always be a sharp contrast in Trumbo’s mind between his honorable literary work and the work he would do for the movies. He saw the latter purely as a means to an end—or so he put it to Elsie McKeogh, when he gave her his reasons for signing his first modest movie contract: “I wanted a place in which to hibernate, safe from the ballyhoo and the pressure to which the highly paid movie writer invariably succumbs. In a word, I want the movies to subsidize me for a while, until I establish myself as a legitimate writer.”

  The contract negotiated for him by Arthur Landau was not quite as modest as it might have been. Warner Bros., for whom Trumbo had been working all along as a reader, acknowledged at last—after a novel had been accepted for publication, and perhaps more important in their eyes, after two stories had been bought by the Saturday Evening Post—that they had a writer of some ability in their employ. They offered him what in 1935 was a standard contract for a junior writer: beginning at fifty dollars per week he would be committed to a seven-year contract, renewable by the studio on six-month options. Landau, however, was able to give him something of a headstart. He took that offer, together with a list of Trumbo’s published works, to an unspecified “rival studio” and got an offer from them. Using this as leverage, they managed to pry a better deal out of Warner Bros. Finally, he signed for quite a raise in pay: in moving from screen reader to screenwriter at the same studio, he went from thirty-five dollars to one hundred dollars per week, with future salary steps raised accordingly.

  In the end, however, it was not dollars and cents but literary considerations that proved stickiest in the negotiations. The usual Hollywood writer’s contract specified that the studio had full rights to everything the writer produced during the terms of that contract. In negotiations and prior to signing, it was up to the writer to declare exceptions—works already written, under way, or under contract. Trumbo declared them at great length and with considerable ingenuity. He called for permission to write two novels for Lovat Dickson and another that he specified by title. The Washington Jitters (his new political satire). In addition, he appended a list of titles—two novels and forty-one short stories—which he declared he had written before the drawing up of this contract, but which he really had not. Trumbo’s comment to Elsie McKeogh:

  This, of course, is deliberate fraud on my part, but it is a fraud which I understand is regularly being perpetrated by Hollywood writers. What I propose to do, of course, is to write stories and affix to them one of the titles I have reserved. In the event the title is not in keeping with the story, I think it would be well for you to write me stating that such and such a publisher has changed the title from the one under which I submitted the story to whatever is considered more appropriate. The letter would cover me at the studio.

  And so it was, at the end of October 1935, with all exceptions noted and reservations duly made, that Dalton Trumbo signed a contract with Warner Bros. and became a screenwriter. He had, he thought, marked out his career very clearly before him. There seemed little doubt in his mind then he would someday be a full-time novelist. Writing for films was to be no more than a temporary solution to his money problems, a bargain struck with necessity. The old story, of course. Nobody, it seems, ever went into films with the intention of staying there. The studios were to serve as way stations to the ivory tower, or back to Broadway—yet passengers collected there in Hollywood, and coaches never departed; those who left usually straggled out alone and on foot. Better than most, Trumbo kept his resolve to concentrate on the writing of fiction: between 1935 and 1941 he would publish four novels—this in addition to a full career as a screenwriter (twenty-one screen credits during that same period). But for a number of good reasons, there were no books written after that. Money considerations played a part here, obviously, although it was not simple, crass love of luxury that made an immensely successful screenwriter out of a promising novelist. Those who think that sadly underestimate the very real satisfactions offered by working at the craft, of knowing you are one of the best at a kind of writing so particular in its demands that some of the finest novelists and pl
aywrights of our century have failed dismally at it.

  Screenwriting surprised him right from the start by being far more difficult than he had ever expected it to be: “When I began to write, it seemed to me I would never learn how. It seemed two or three years before I had any confidence in myself. The problem of plot, as with most young writers, troubled me greatly before I got used to it and learned how to handle it moderately well, and then I began to feel at home.” The craft of writing—whether novels, screenplays, essays, or whatever—held a special fascination for Trumbo. And his work always showed great technical proficiency. Even as flimsy a story as “Darling Bill,” his first in the Post, is made interesting at least from the standpoint of technique because of the epistolary form in which it is cast. So with Trumbo, the early difficulties he experienced in learning the craft of screenwriting would enhance the enterprise in his eyes.

  He joined the B-picture unit at Warner Bros., then under the command of Bryan Foy, a producer whose specialty of low-budget production had earned him the title “king of the B’s.” The idea was to keep the budget for each B picture at about one hundred thousand dollars. Such films would always be, in effect, remakes of successful A pictures. Now, these were not out-and-out thefts, because Foy always wanted the original scripts to be completely rewritten—characters added and changed, plot and situation altered, and so on. In this way, the job of screenwriter for Bryan Foy was that of adapter. Ingenuity, rather than creativity, mattered most. Trumbo remembers that the first time he talked to Foy, the producer confronted him with a problem. He asked him to imagine a man at the bottom of a pit, sixty feet deep, with smooth, vertical walls and absolutely no way to get out: “Can you imagine how you would get him into that situation?” Foy wanted to know. Trumbo thought a moment and said, yes, he believed he could get him into that pit. “Well,” said Foy, “if you can get him out, too, then we’re in good shape.” That, he told Trumbo, was just the kind of thing they wanted on the B unit.

  It was a good place to learn the craft. A screenwriter had to work within all sorts of limitations. The one that governed all the rest, of course, was budget. Because the actors and actresses available for such productions were often not much better than semiskilled labor, great emphasis was put on visual storytelling: the fewer lines there were for them to remember, the fewer retakes would be likely. But there were visual limitations, too. Tracking shots were out, as well as any other expensive camera setups. Establishing shots were kept to a minimum—none of this getting out of the car and walking into the door of the building then into the elevator, before you begin that scene on the twenty-third floor. You got into a scene just as quickly as possible, got through it, and got out of it. As a result, there was a kind of quick, nervous energy to most B films which gave them a visual style much different from that of the A films of the same period. Looked at today, there is a “modern” quality that emerges from the way the old B’s were shot and edited, a quality that was created almost wholly out of financial necessity.

  Working on the B unit, a screenwriter found his selection of material somewhat limited. Theoretically, Trumbo and his colleagues could have turned down any project; but he wanted to learn, and so he turned nothing down. He did two films at Warner Bros., both of them released during 1936. The first, Road Gang, was based loosely on Paul Muni’s fine film from 1932, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. This was the source of Trumbo’s original screenplay, which was directed by Louis King, then already a veteran of B-picture production (eventually, as many did, he would graduate to A pictures and direct Thunderhead, Son of Flicka, The Green Grass of Wyoming, and Mrs. Mike before his death in 1962). Trumbo’s second film at Warners was Love Begins at 20. He shares screenplay credit on this one with a Tom Reed, but in this case it was not a previous film but a play that provided the source—Broken Dishes, by Martin Flavin.

  Visiting Trumbo’s friends was not always so pleasant. Oh, they’d all talk. If they could squeeze you in while they were pressing hard to finish this movie or that, or if you happened to catch them when they had just finished an assignment, then all you had to do was ask and the answers poured forth. There was among them all a common desire to go on record, for each to do what he could to get the man’s story told. It made things a lot easier.

  Not all of them were doing so well, however. You realized, visiting screenwriters who have been between assignments for years, that for them the blacklist was not over, and perhaps never would be. It was much too easy for us to think of the blacklist as something unfortunate that happened years ago, an episode in the past. After all, Trumbo was working again, and so were Albert Maltz, Michael Wilson, Waldo Salt, Ring Lardner, Jr. But not everybody. If you were on your way up—or worse, on your way down—when the House Committee on Un-American Activities struck, then the odds of ever returning from exile were not nearly so favorable. For every screenwriter, director, and actor who made it back after the blacklist there were probably four or five who never did.

  One of these was John Bright. He had managed to make an honorable living on the fringes of the movie business. He had done some work in television, and he did occasional articles and reviews for some of the smaller magazines. But his career as a screenwriter is over when I meet with him, and he knows it.

  He lives on a street in North Hollywood, a kind of blue-collar annex to the movie town. He is a tall, ungainly man—pleasant and polite but slightly reserved, and—how to put this? He doesn’t quite connect. Or we don’t. There are, anyway, awkward gaps in our talk. We jump around a lot.

  “Where did I first meet him? That would have been Warner Bros.—oh, very early in the thirties. I was a writer and he was a reader.”

  They got along well right from the start—and that speaks well for Bright, for at that time he was just about the hottest writer at Warner Bros. He and his partner Kubec Glasmon had blown into town from Chicago, filled with racket lore, bursting with arcane anecdotes of Capone and Bugs Moran, and they had headed for the one studio in Hollywood where that knowledge and those stories were most in demand. Warner Bros.–First National had just finished Little Caesar with Edward G. Robinson, and it was a great hit—so great, in fact, that the studio initiated what was to become a whole cycle of gangster movies. And Bright and Glasmon wrote the biggest and best of them all, The Public Enemy, the movie which, as brought to the screen by William Wellman, made Jimmy Cagney a star. Bright was a master of the hardboiled; his dialogue was written to be delivered from the corner of the mouth. Blonde Crazy, Smart Money, Taxi—they were all big A pictures that helped set Warner Bros.’ tough, strident, swaggering image during the thirties and into the forties. And although the two were about the same age, Trumbo was then professionally very much John Bright’s junior.

  “What was he like then?” I ask him.

  “Trumbo? Oh, he was an acerbic, rasping, extravagant character. The way he is today, only more so. Only, no. There was a difference in him back then. He was unhappy. He put some of this in the novel he wrote back then. What was the name of it?”

  “Eclipse.”

  “Yes, that’s it. The main thing was, I think, that he wasn’t happy with what he had achieved. He thought he should be further along than he was. He was too talented to be just a reader. Anyone could tell that. Most readers played it safe and said no to everything. But not him. They had to notice him because he made these wild recommendations on movie projects—Ulysses, Lady Chatterley, Candide, Rabelais.”

  “And that was how he became a writer?”

  “More or less. I mean, he was bound to catch their eye anyway. He was just too talented to ignore. They made him a writer at Warners, then he went on to RKO, and the rest is history. It was hit after hit. You look him up in the book. He’s probably got the most successful set of credits of any screenwriter ever to work in the business.”

  He hesitates then and shrugs, coming to a full stop.

  “Did he change much? I don’t know quite how to put this,” I say, “but when he began getting
money, he got his money all at once, didn’t he?”

  “Oh sure. He was just like anybody else would have been. He’d been a poor boy, after all. I take it you know all about the bakery and his father dying and everything? Well, when he got some money, then all of a sudden he wanted five of everything. He just couldn’t get enough of the creature comforts. I remember I visited him once up at the ranch. And he asked if I thought I might get cold. Well, just in case—and he pulls out six electric blankets. Six!”

  He shakes his head, remembering, then looks up and fixes me with his eye. “You talk about whether he’s changed. He is, believe me, the most unhypocritical man I have known in a town of hypocrites. A strictly no-bullshit character in a town of bullshitters. Also a compulsive man at the typewriter. I suppose you know that. I share the same syndrome with him. When he finishes something he goes on to something else immediately. It’s almost impossible for him to take a vacation. That’s the way I am myself. When he gets wound up in a project, well, there’s just no getting him away from it. I remember when he was living in Altadena and was working on Exodus. He called me up and read me thirty to fifty pages of it—on the telephone! Just wanted to get my reaction. That’s the way he is.

  “Oh, and I think it should be noted—though without any specific names—that if the truth were known, Dalton Trumbo is one of the softest touches in the world. If anyone’s ever got any trouble, they turn to him. Right now he’s probably owed thousands by people around town. He’s more open-handed than anyone I’ve ever known. I ought to know. I myself was beneficiary of several legs up from Dalton. That’s one reason he’s sentimental about me, you know.”

  “Oh? What…?”

  “I helped support his family when he was in prison. But I was just paying him back money I owed him—money he never asked me for. I’m very much in his debt. I always will be. Why, when I came up from Mexico in 1959, and the blacklist was still on, Trumbo got me my first job on the black market. I went on and did four pictures for that producer. I’m not sure he’d want me to give his name even now, though.”